The man came to his feet with some effort and looked around the room. He was confused at first and did not recognize anything around him. Thinking felt almost new to him, as if he had woken from a deep sleep, a sleep deeper than death itself. His memories felt stretched apart like a worn spring, but slowly he started to recognize things around him as his fragmented existence began to tumble itself into a recognizable whole.

The first thing he realized was that he was in a familiar room, and there was a bed by his side. Lying on the bed was a pale, older, man dressed in an impeccable business suit. The suit was obviously custom tailored but appeared to be too large for the older man. On closer examination, he realized that the older man was dead. His skin was gaunt and stretched as if he had struggled near the end of his life, to the point of being unable to eat for quite some time. There was a poultice pressed to the corpse’s head with a kitchen rag, messy and dripping onto the pillow with medication that had failed to save him.

Samuel Diaz